Europe
November 18, 2015
Source: Monsanto Europe-Africa
Agriculture can be helped by precision farming, resulting in less use of water, fertiliser and crop protection products: reducing waste. Image courtesy Aquatek blog.
If you were to play a word association game, adding “precision” and “farming” together is probably not the most obvious juxtaposition, but that may be about to change. Precision farming is looking set to become one of the leading innovations in the agriculture-technology (agri-tech) revolution’.The EU has just released a report of a recently held focus group discussing precision farming: November 2015 EIP-AGRI Focus Group Precision Farming Final Report.
This report is the latest in an ongoing discussion around innovation in agriculture that has been taking place in the EU since the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was first proposed in July last year. In these discussions, one message stands out: agriculture must integrate innovative technologies.
We all know the context: the UN expects the world population to rise from 7.3 billion today to 9.7 billion in 2050. In order to meet food demands, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations projects that global agricultural production in 2050 will have to be 60 percent higher than in 2005/2007. Meanwhile, both agricultural land and wild places—including forests and wetlands—are becoming rarer. Whilst there are many tools that need to be deployed to meet this increased demand, agri tech is front and centre when solutions are discussed.
The EU is trying to bring existing technologies that can form a bridge between innovation and environmental protection into the debate. Precision farming has emerged as a key solution.
Precision farming is already being promoted by the EU through initiatives such as funding projects via the Horizon 2020 programme and the European Innovation Partnership on Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI).
So what exactly is precision farming?
Precision farming was defined by the US House of Representatives in 1997 as, “an integrated information and production-based farming system that is designed to increase long term, site-specific and whole-farm production efficiency, productivity and profitability while minimising unintended impacts on wildlife and the environment”. Since then, the concept has expanded to include the use of Big Data to inform farmers’ decisions.
For crop systems, it means that while conventionally, fertilisers and herbicides are used uniformly over variable fields, precision farming enables farmers to know precisely where these products are needed and where they are not. The whole point of precision farming is to achieve a productive, sustainable system by applying just the right amount of water, fertiliser and crop protection products, at just the right time, in just the right place, reducing waste.
With conventional farming still representing 94.2 percent of the total agricultural sector in Europe, we still have a long way to go before this transformational innovation is commonplace in European farms.
This is something that we are working on at Monsanto. At Monsanto, we allocate more than 10 percent of turnover a year to research and development, with a portion of that money dedicated to precision planting technologies. In Europe, Monsanto has been involved in the AquaTEK™ project in Italy since 2013: it’s a project focused on water conservation in crop systems, among other things.
The three main pillars of AquaTEK™ are to train farmers; develop and make available decision-support tools (sensors and satellite data) that enable farmers to take informed decisions about their needs; and the distribution of more efficient irrigation and fertiliser application systems (fertigation).
Since 2013, over 70 technicians have been trained on how to use the technology, and 7,000 farmers in Italy have been shown how to adapt to efficient irrigation systems. As standards and definitions wind their way to becoming regulations and directives across Europe, we believe that these farmers will be the ones leading the agri-tech revolution.
Now is the time to encourage further the debate on precision farming, to protect our natural resources and to create a sustainable global farming model. Ensuring enough food for all of us in the decades to come is the ultimate goal.
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